Sorting Supplies - Whose Crayon is That One?

A couple of years ago,
I was collecting all of my nieces and nephews
of a preschool age
and schooling them together twice a week.
There were 10 kids,
and 5 families in the group.

Each child brought their own pencil box,
partly to make life a lot easier for the grown ups,
and partly because they felt so grown up
toting their own back pack
"to school".

We would spend about 2 hours doing drills,
papers, lessons, crafts, and PE time.

Somebody always left a crayon or marker behind.
And since most of them had identical supplies,
we were never sure who to give the forgotten item
back to the next time they came.

So here is ONE solution that we came up with.

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A large challenge when you have multiple children schooling together ...

is

keeping track of which supplies belong to which child.

It's not easy when all 10 preschoolers have the exact same box of crayola crayons.
How do you know which one left the red crayon?

In the past, AK has tried to lable them with letters of their name.

But now we have 4 A's, 2 M's, 2 K's.

So AR4 labled hers 1,2,3,4

Do you know how much a 3 looks like an M on the side of a crayon?

Complicating this issue is that I don't see very well.

So we came up with this idea ...

label with colored tape.

The plan was to use masking tape for each child.

But we found duct tape .. and sport tape.

We bought the sport tape for the rest of the kids.

Scholar wanted us to take the blue off of ALL of his and replace it with yellow.

Now I KNOW all of the Cars items are his...
but he wanted EVERYTHING labeled.

I asked Scholar if we should label the watch he bought himself for his birthday.

What a look I got.

Then he laughed.